Once you have established your marketing goals, your brand personality and a guiding understanding of who you are trying to reach, the content audit is a sometimes laborious but necessary next step. The content audit involves an audit of all the existing content supplied by the brand – the website, white papers, articles, videos and content shared on social media sites can all be considered.
An assessment can then be made of how well these pieces of content match the strategic needs of the brand and its audience.
While you can either thoroughly immerse yourself in this process or attempt to get a more time-efficient overview, the goal is to map what is currently on offer with what is necessary in mind. It is important not just to understand what you have, but also how it is currently organised and accessed by your audience.
Many practitioners suggest the use of a spreadsheet to achieve this. Content can be found to be either mismatched to the goals of the organisation, or spot on. Most importantly, you can establish what is missing. Are your customer needs being addressed? Where do the opportunities lie?
